In the News (Fri 18 Aug 17)

This means that Spanish, like other Indo-European languages, through its oldest to its modern form, has steadily depended less on inflections (suffixes on nouns, adjectives etc.) to demonstrate syntactical relationships and more on word order and prepositions.

This is one of the most predictable patterns in the development of Spanish and the first written record of it is from 863 when the Latin 'Forticius' was written as 'OrtiÃ§o.' The h- was originally pronounced as an aspirate (i.e.

The Spanish educational system, and later the Real Academia EspaÃ±ola, with their demand that all consonants of a word be pronounced, steadily drove most simplified forms from existence.

From Antiquity through the 17th century, from Pindar to Sir Thomas Browne, etymology has been a form of witty wordplay, in which the supposed origins of words were mythologized to satisfy contemporary requirements, much as myths were formed to explain archaic rituals that were no longer comprehensible.

Although, it must be said, many of Nietzsche's etymologies are wrong, the strategy has gained popularity in the 20th century, with philosophers such as Jacques Derrida using etymologies to indicate former meanings of words with view to decentring the "violent hierarchies" of Western metaphysics.

The major in Spanish is designed to develop a students proficiency in the language while assuring that he or she receives a strong background in linguistics, literature, culture or a combination of these areas.

Faculty Spanish majors have access to a nationally-ranked group of faculty members whose expertise ranges across a wide range of areas: peninsular literature from the medieval to the modern periods; Latin American literature from Colonial times to the present; Portuguese and Brazilian literature; Spanish cinema; Hispanic womens writing; Spanish and Latin-American culture; and Hispanic linguistics.

When declaring the Spanish major, all students are required to choose one of the three tracks described belowthe general track, the literature and culture track, and the linguistics and philology trackto give structure to their Spanish studies.

In the contemporary Philippines, fluency in Spanish is generally restricted to a small and aging elite of mixed Philippine-Spanish heritage; the typical fluent Spanish speaker has at least one parent or grandparent born in Spain, and belongs to wealthy landowning or empresarial classes far-removed from the grass-roots level at which Chabacano is spoken.

Spanish is still a subject in the university curriculum (despite current pressure to remove the requirement), and formerly Spanish was widely taught in the public schools.

Spanish speakers are frequently members of Spanish landowning and commercial families, which have managed to retain and even expand their fortunes throughout the various post-colonial administrations in the Philippines.

This Spanish term, which means "rabbit," comes from the Latin word cuniculus, which, itself, was copied letter-for-letter from an even earlier Iberian term--according to Pliny the Elder--referring to both the animal and its burrow--and, by extension, any underground passage or canal.

The reason is that Naples was a Spanish possession during the reign of the Habsburg Emperor Charles V of Spain (I of Germany)(r.

As any second-level Spanish student knows, this is the polite version of the second-person, singular pronoun which means "You;" however, although it is a second-person pronoun, verbs associated with it are conjugated in the third person (ie, "He," "She," "It").

No desciption of etymology is complete without the mention of the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India, who were the first in the world to make such a comprehensive analysis of linguistics, and especially etymology.

The earliest of attested etymologies can be found the the Vedic literature itself—in the philosophical explanations of the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas and the Upanishads.

Although many of Nietzsche's etymologies are wrong, the strategy has gained popularity in the 20th century, with philosophers such as Jacques Derrida using etymologies to indicate former meanings of words with view to decentring the "violent hierarchies" of Western metaphysics.

She examines noun phrase gender agreement in the speech of seven third-year university learners of Spanish, describing the strategies used by intermediate-level learners of Spanish in the acquisition of gender agreement within the context of the noun phrase.

All facets of Spanish /s/-reduction (and similar processes affecting word-final consonants vis-à-vis resyllabification) are accounted for by a single unified family of alignment constraints, all of which are widely attested cross-linguistically.

He proposes to extend a small clause analysis of predicate inversion to Spanish dative-experiencer constructions: the clitic dative pronoun attaches to the head F and the embedded verb or the embedded preposition raises to an empty F. This proposal allows us to explain the behavior of these structures with respect to subject extraction.

Publisher description for Library of Congress control number 84028749(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-09)

Etymology is the history of words, and, as words stand for things, it is also the history of things, and therefore of civilisation.

In view of the proportion of words with similar etymologies in certain languages, this Spanish etymological dictionary can also be used to find the origin of thousands of English, French, Italian and Portuguese words as well as that of many words from other languages.

It is of particular value to students and teachers of Spanish and to translators and conference interpreters.

Etymology has been largely neglected since the beginning of this century.

He also examines the complex and changing interrelationship between etymology and general linguistics in recent times, with the intention of revitalising etymological research.

In different times and at different places, etymology has meant slightly or entirely different things to the few or many people who, under varying sets of circumstances, have used that word, applying it to their own spheres of interests.

This etymology and the observation that the attested form is somewhat irregular in terms of it are from:

The lack of a transparent etymology in Teton and Santee leads to folk etymologies in terms of *s^a=iye=la (~ =naN) a made-up form 'to speak red(ly)', construed to mean 'to speak obscurely, not clearly', by analogy with the real form iye'=ska 'to speak clearly, to speak the local language, to translate'.

The folk etymology, however, is not parallel in structure to iye'=ska - s^a 'red' precedes ska 'white, clear', for example - and does not explain the h or the diminutive.

Most Spanish nouns that begin with al- are derived from Arabic, in which "al" is the definite article "the." (Alcazar = "castle", alforja = "saddlebag", alcatraz = "pelican".) English has a few of these Arabic carryovers as well, e.g., alcohol and albatross.

Part of the problem with Spanishetymology is that for centuries after the 15th-century Reconquest of Iberia -- when the Moors and Jews were driven out by Catholics -- Spaniards were in total denial of their Arabic past, which had lasted seven centuries.

However, not being Spanish etymologists (or etymologists of Spanish!), we must defer to one of our readers who also happens to be a Spanish linguist, for the final word on the derivation of the place name Albu(r)querque.

The Spanish equivalent of the Petit Larousse, this dictionary is carefully brought up-to-date and takes into account the latest changes of vocabulary and facts in Spain and Latin America.

This comprehensive Spanish monolingual dictionary offers 22,000 entries, with their definitions and numerous examples that help you understand the meaning of the word and how it is used in context.

This is a book of Spanish words, with synonyms, and definitions that are prsented on a level suitable for Spanish-speaking children, as well as for elementary school children being introduced to Spanish.

The Aztecs extracted the flavoring from the fruits using a process of fermentation and the extract would be later called Vanilla.

When Spanish conquerors, on the southeast coast of Mexico, first came into contact with Vanilla they called it "Vainilla" (Spanish for little pods) because their elongated fruit, which contained the seeds, reminded them of the "vainas" (pods) of some leguminous plants.

One wonders if the Swedish botanist, Olof Schwartz, thought about the shape of the pod (a sheath) or of its aphrodisiac properties when he named the orchid Vanilla.